Playboy's History of the Sexual Revolution Part III (1920--1929): The Jazz Age

At a small church in Muncie, Indiana, a well-meaning Sunday school teacher talks of the temptation, the spiritual dangers posed by physical comfort, wealth and fame.

"Can you think of any temptation we have today that Jesus didn't have?" he asks.

"Speed!" one boy shouts out.

Speed. Not just the urge to step on the gas in the family Ford, but an entirely new feeling of acceleration and excitement. Thomas Edison tells the readers of The Saturday Evening Post that "the automobile has accustomed everyone to speed, to quickness of action and to control, as well as removing the mystery from machinery. The motion picture has increased the quickness of perception to a really remarkable degree. The motion picture--no matter what one may think of the pictures presented--is the greatest quickener of brain action we have ever had." An ad in the same magazine proclaims: "Go to a motion picture and let yourself go. See brilliant men, beautiful jazz babies, champagne baths, midnight revels, petting parties in the purple dawn, all ending in one terrific smashing climax that makes you gasp."

A Muncie judge interviewed for the 1929 study Middlelown tells Robert and Helen Lynd, two sociologists studying small-town America, that a weekly diet of movies is corrupting youth. The habitual "linking of the taking of long chances and the happy ending," he says, is one of the main causes of delinquency. It is also, one suspects, the very sold of America.

A young writer named F. Scott Fitzgerald captures the spirit of the age in stories about petting parties and daring debutantes, one of whom briefly ponders the nature of her reputation and the series of escapades that led to her nickname "Speed." Fitzgerald's fiction reveals a flickering world of silk hats and fur, jeweled throats, women with tight coiffures and men with slick hair, a kaleidoscope of young people made beautiful by the bright lights of a carnival city. His Tales of the Jazz Age names this era of flaming youth, of flappers in short skirts and cloche hats, of college boys in bellbottoms and raccoon coats, of hip flasks and frivolity, of decadence and debunking, of flagpole sitters and mah-jongg, of sheiks and shebas. Jazz--the music that left behind the score, that wrought sounds from instruments in ways that were never dreamt of by Johann Sebastian Bach. Jazz--a slang word for sex--now connotes all that is new and modern.

The nation seems to be intoxicated by youth. John Held captures the life of the campus crowd in drawings for Life and College Humor. Joe College and Betty Coed set the standard for the decade. Coeds flatten their breasts with the newfangled brassieres; they not only show a little leg, they draw additional attention to themselves by rolling down their stockings and powering their knees. They smoke and, if not exactly indulging in sexual escapdes themselves, admit enough knowledge to enjoy a double entendre.

Dorothy Parker, a formidable member of the Algonquin Round Table, opines that brevity is the soul of lingerie and that if all the girls in the Yale prom were laid end to end, she wouldn't be surprised.

America's precious daughters leave home wearing corsets but check them at the door to dance the shimmy. The dance craze that swirled through the previous decade continues unabated with the Charleston. Despite the efforts of Ladies' Home Journal to launch a crusade against "unspeakable jazz," flaming youth sings, dances and falls in love to the music of George Gershwin. Down the same streets that suffragettes marched, flappers conduct Charleston marathons.

The philosophy forged in World War One--"Live for the moment, for tomorrow we die"--flies its banner long after Armistice Day. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald embody the new spirit, riding down Fifth Avenue on the tops of taxicabs, diving into the fountain outside the Plaza Hotel, displaying what their friend Edmund Wilson describes as a remarkable "capacity for carrying things off and carrying people away by their spontaneity, charm and good looks. They have a genius for imaginative improvisations."

Scott Fitzgerald survives by writing articles such as "How to Live on $36,000 a Year" at a time when the average salary in America is less than $1500 a year. The prosperity that gives the Roaring Twenties its name seems to fuel extravagant gestures.

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Life is a joyride, an adventure. What used to take years to unfold happens in an evening. And, it seems, the whole world is watching. Americans turn to magazines such as True Story and True Confessions, magazines that offer "sex adventure" stories told in the first person which contain glamorous settings, frantic action, high emotion and heavy sentiment. "A moral conclusion," says one editor, "is essential."

Where Ladies' Home Journal offers a vision of middle-class America as it wants to be, True Story presents life in titillating, tawdry detail. Its circulation grows from 300,000 in 1923 to almost 2 million by 1926.

What the pulps miss, the daily newspapers supply with all the tabloid ballyhoo the press barons can muster. Journalists try to capture the energy and enthusiasm of the age with a whole new language. Everything is keen, copacetic, screwy or the ritz. Walter Winchell gives us: to middle aisle (to marry), on the merge (engaged) and uh-huh (in love), as well as popularizes phooey, giggle water and making whoopee.

When someone draws a crowd--be it a wingwalker or a flagpole sitter--the crowd extends to every breakfast table in the nation. We celebrate the frivolous and the fantastic. Local heroes become legends in their own time: Babe Ruth becomes the Sultan of Swat, Red Grange the Galloping Ghost, and the whole world cheers when Lucky Lindy flies across the Atlantic alone.

The tabloids dispense fame and infamy in equal measure. A sordid lover's triangle in Queens Village, New York--in which Ruth Snyder persuades lover Judd Gray to bash in her husband's head with a sash weight--generates more press coverage, according to one historian, than the sinking of the Titanic, Lindbergh's flight, the Armistice and the overthrow of the German Empire. None dare call it journalism: The press has elevated scandal to a national sport. Millions follow the disappearance of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who concocts a tale of a seaside kidnapping to cover a 36-day dalliance with a lover. When fans of the gospel radio star claim to have seen her cavorting in Carmel, she appears in public with seven look-alikes.

Dorothy Dix, a "sob sister" whose column reaches more than a million readers, compares gossip to a moral force:

A young woman writes me that she considers she has a right to live her own life in her own way and do exactly as she pleases. So she has broken most of the Ten Commandments and snapped her fingers in the face of Mrs. Grundy. And now that she finds her reputation being torn to tatters, she thinks that, she is being most unfairly treated. Not at all. Gossip is one of the most powerful influences in the world for good. We can stifle the voice of conscience, but we can't silence the voice of our neighbors. We can dupe ourselves into believing that we have a right to make our own code of conduct, but we cannot force the community in which we live to take our point of view on the matter.

A young agent at the Department of Justice also knows the power of gossip. John Edgar Hoover, the new chief of the General Intelligence Division, takes his experience as a clerk at the Library of Congress and begins an index of radical elements in America. The raw files--which expand to include Hoover's political enemies--contain rumors of sexual impropriety, episodes of adultery and promiscuity, allegations of homosexuality. In 1924 he is appointed head of the Bureau of Investigation, which will soon be known as the FBI.

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The radio--still an experiment at the beginning of the decade--will become a member of the family. A mere curiosity a few years before, the Victrola becomes a necessity. For the first time in history, the average man makes love to music. Mark Sullivan, author of a six-volume history of the era, devotes 67 pages to music: "Many popular songs," he suggests, "are for humans the equivalents of the love calls of birds and animals." Romantic love songs cram years of courtship into a few verses. "Your lips may say no, no, but there's yes, yes in your eyes." Songs ask and answer the question that is on everyone's mind.

Sullivan valiantly tries to determine the best love song of the age. Is it Gimme a Little Kiss, Will Ya, Huh? or the cosmic urge crooned by the featherless biped, I Gotta Have You?

A writer suggests that the appeal of women is the same as it has always been, only now there's more showing. The hemlines of skirts rise like the curtain at the Ziegfeld Follies. Lawmakers in Utah try to pass a law to punish women whose skirts are higher than three inches above the ankle. At the other end of the candle, the Virginia legislature tries to prohibit evening gowns that show more than three inches of throat. On Wall Street, statisticians chart the rise and fall of the stock market in terms of skirt hemlines. Another journal charts freedom in terms of the yards of cloth required to clothe a woman: From 1913 to 1928 the figure went from 19-1/2 yards to 7.

It is feared that more women read Women's Wear Daily than read the Bible. The Old Testament has given way to testimonials.

Ads warn that a woman who doesn't use Listerine will always be a bridesmaid, never a bride. But ads also foster an atmosphere of romance: A copywriter for a Jordan motor car called the Playboy celebrates a mythical "lass whose face is brown with the sun when the day is done of revel and romp and race."

The word-magic of advertising is infectious: America suffers an epidemic of self-improvement. Millions of 97-pound weaklings turn to Charles Atlas, and become new men after ten weeks of "dynamic tension." Émile Coué, author of Self-Mastery Through Conscious Auto-Suggestion, dispenses optimism to millions of disciples who are advised to (continued on page 112)The Jazz Age(continued from page 86) recite: "Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better."

Fitzgerald, whose This Side of Paradise launched the decade, creates another character, Jay Gatsby, who reinvents himself by following a simple blueprint: "Rise from bed. Dumbbell exercise and wall scaling. Study electricity. Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it. Study needed inventions. Bathe every other day. Read one improving book or magazine per week." In one such magazine, Physical Culture, an ad asks: "Are you shackled by repressed desires? Psychoanalysis, the new miracle science, proves that most people live only half-power lives because of repressed sex instincts."

Novelist Elinor Glyn celebrates a certain quality: "It." "To have 'It,"' she writes, "the fortunate possessor must have that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes. There must be physical attraction, but beauty is unnecessary." Americans start looking for that magical trait in one another.

It is an atmosphere saturated with romance. It is a world, says Fitzgerald, where "the biography of every woman begins with the first kiss that counts," where a man finds that "after half a dozen kisses a proposal is expected."

The YMCA issues a warning: "Pet and die young."

Words to live by.

Dating

"Question: Do you think your son will soon forget all he learned at college? Answer: I hope so. He can't make a living necking."

--Joke in Columbia Jester

The change in courtship rituals that began with the turn of the century was almost complete. Instead of suitors and proper daughters, America had created two new creatures: boyfriends and girlfriends. No longer would men sit in parlors, under the scrutiny of parents, while the object of their affection played the piano. Now, hats in hands, they were met at the door by girls who expected to be taken out--a Harper's article in 1924 bemoaned the fate of one boy caught in such an expectation, who ended up spending a month's salary on his date. The word date entered the vocabulary, having changed from its original meaning. No longer only the assignation of a prostitute and client, it denoted a day spent behind a six-cylinder engine, driving to parties halfway across the state, or an evening in a half-lit dancehall, knocking bare knees to the beat of a local band.

A poster from a dancehall of the Twenties suggests some of the thrills available to attendees. These were the sort of activities the chief of police of Lansing, Michigan tried to prevent: "No shadow or spotlight dances allowed. Moonlight dances not allowed where a single light is used to illuminate the hall. All unnecessary shoulder or body movement or gratusque [sic] dances positively prohibited. All unnecessary hesitation, rocking from one foot to the other and seesawing back and forth of the dancers will be prohibited. No beating of drum to produce jazz effect will be allowed."

A survey of boys and girls in Middletown revealed that the new forms of dating caused disagreement with parents. Almost half cited the number of times they went out on school nights as a source of friction. Almost as many mentioned fighting over the family car and the hour they got in at night. The telephone became love's ally. Advice columns, replacing pulpits as the arbiters of courtship, answered queries about the new technology. "Ought a girl to give a man her telephone number after only brief acquaintance?" The answer was a firm no. But millions of girls did.

The telephone created instant intimacy: "As it was, a girl lying in bed could hear the voice of her boyfriend on her pillow, a voluptuous thrill which would have been regarded as wildly improper in days of prudery," wrote E.S. Turner in A History of Courting. "The man might be standing in a drafty telephone box, but in fancy he was right there on the pillow with his voice."

The new forms of courtship were perplexing. One teenager wrote to American Magazine in September 1924 to complain that he had spent about $5000 over the past five years on dating, an average of nearly $20 a week. "I must say that the conversation, entertainment and mental companionship that I have received in return for this $1000 a year seem to me to be priced beyond their real value." His father had managed a three-year courtship on a mere $60.

Turner elaborates: "The entire cost of wooing, marriage license, preacher's fee and honeymoon was less than $200. One disillusioned writer complained that girls appeared to think it sufficient just to be girls, in return for which the world owed them a living: 'A whole lot of girls are making the mistake of giving too little and asking too much. They have a very good business and they are killing it.' The writer called for a buyers' strike, but he clearly did not expect to enlist any recruits."

Women who played the courtship game for high stakes were called gold diggers--a label that covered both stage girls who married millionaires and young girls who made boys spend money while giving nothing in return. Feminists said that since nothing was fair in the workplace (men made more money), then all was fair in love.

The cover of Life pictured the flapper as a butterfly. Beauty--a creation of the gods--had returned to the world, wrote Fitzgerald, as "a ragtime kid, a flapper, a jazz baby and a baby vamp." And when women change, everything changes.

The New Rules

The Twenties saw the abandonment of the ideal Victorian woman, that angelic being free from the taint of sexual desire. Theodore Dreiser had complained in an essay published in 1920 that "women are now so good, the sex relationship so vile a thing, that to think of the two at once is not to be thought of." But one looked at the flapper and thought of all sorts of things. "The emancipated flapper is just plain female under her paint and outside her cocktails," wrote Gertrude Atherton in her novel Black Oxen. "More so for she's more stimulated. Where girls used to be merely romantic, she's romantic, plus sex instinct rampant."

Historian Frederick Lewis Allen described the flapper this way: "In effect the woman of the postwar decade said to man, 'You are tired and disillusioned, you do not want the cares of a family or the companionship of mature wisdom, you want exciting play, you want the thrills of sex without their fruition, and I will give them to you.' And to herself she added, 'But I will be free."'

Women developed a code. According to Peter Ling, author of a treatise on sex and the automobile in the Twenties, "each of the phases of petting came to be associated with a corresponding emotional stage in a couple's relationship. Kissing, while not automatic, was all right if the two merely liked each other: deep or French kissing indicated romantic attachment; breast-touching through the clothing heralded that things were becoming serious, and continued under the brassiere if the feelings intensified. Finally, explorations below the waist were reserved only for couples who considered themselves truly in love. The culmination of this logic was intercourse with one's fiancé."

The youth of the Twenties were the first American generation to embrace sex as the central adventure in life. As one writer noted: "One is tempted to picture investigators hunting for that special morning between 1919 and 1929 when 51 percent of the young unmarried in America awoke to find that they were no longer virgins."

It's not that this generation discovered premarital intercourse--it discovered erotic play. Characters in Fitzgerald's stories endlessly discussed the politics of the kiss. Gloria, the heroine of The Beautiful and Damned, could tell a suitor: "A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress." She had kissed dozens of men and expected to kiss dozens more. Zelda Fitzgerald would tell a friend: "I only like men who kiss as a means to an end. I never know how to treat the other kind." Americans read her husband's descriptions of petting parties and diligently sought out darkened rooms or country club greens to savor the new freedom. Fitzgerald even wrote about kissing for the New York American: "Why Blame It on the Poor Kiss If the Girl Veteran of Many Petting Parties Is Prone to Affairs After Marriage?" (On the other hand, an Englishman writing about the Twenties asked bluntly, "What did Scott Fitzgerald precisely mean by 'kissing'?" Was it code for intercourse, or was the whole nation in high school?)

The Twenties saw the loss of the vocabulary of sin, of the scarlet letter that said any woman who sampled sex outside marriage was doomed to a life of prostitution and white slavery. Sex was no longer absolutely equated with ruination.

The chaperone, that Victorian relic, became extinct, to be replaced by a new moral guardian, Mrs. Manners. In 1925 Anna Steese Richardson's Standard Etiquette addressed the modern woman. "The bachelor girl is a new figure in the social world. She is not even mentioned in etiquette books written as recently as two years ago. The girl who drove an ambulance in France is apt to think she can live her own life in America." Emily Post wrote Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage for an upwardly mobile America. The book went through 17 printings before the author discovered that the world had changed. Not all of her readers were interested in proper conduct at the opera. In 1927 Post would add a chapter that warned girls against the temptations of the Jazz Age: "Continuous pursuit of thrill and consequent craving for greater and greater excitement gradually produce the same result as that which a drug produces in an addict; or to change the metaphor, promiscuous crowding and shoving, petting and cuddling, have the same cheapening effect as that produced on merchandise which has through constant handling become faded and rumpled, smudged or frayed and thrown out on the bargain counter in a marked-down lot."

The advice givers accepted that dating was an exchange. The new standard for moral decline, articulated by Post, was economic: "The typical meaning of the word cheapness is exemplified in the girl or woman who puts no value on herself; who shows no reserves mentally, morally or physically, who does not mind being nudged or pushed or shoved, is willing to be kissed and petted--in other words, to put herself in a class with the food on a free lunch counter."

Clearly a change was sweeping across America, if not the whole world. Overseeing his own cultural revolution in Russia, no less a personage than Lenin dealt with the problems posed by free love. "Of course thirst must be satisfied," he wrote, "but will the normal man lie down in the gutter and drink out of a puddle or out of a glass with a rim greasy from many lips?"

Gloria of The Beautiful and Damned recounts that one of her many suitors, a man she had kissed, had the audacity to compare her to "a public drinking glass."

Science and Seduction

In the Twenties, psychoanalysis was as popular a phenomenon as crossword puzzles or mah-jongg. Not that anyone bothered to read Freud. (Indeed, by 1927 there were only nine practicing psychoanalysts in New York City.) But even if few Americans fully understood Freud's theories of the unconscious, everyone was familiar with them. Interpreting dreams was a parlor game based on a simple principle: Everything could be traced to sex. Science--an authority challenging that of the church--had given its stamp of approval to lust, proclaiming that desire was a drive equal to hunger or thirst.

It is hard to conceive of the level of sexual ignorance at the beginning of the century, but one example will suffice. An Englishwoman, Marie Carmichael Stopes, obtained a doctor of science degree in London and a doctor of philosophy degree in Munich. Yet she remained a virgin for the first six months of her marriage without realizing that the union had not been consummated. (Her husband was impotent.) One of the most highly educated women of her time did not know the first thing about sexual intercourse.

She resolved to correct the oversight. She wrote Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties. Unable to find a publisher in England, she had the work printed in America. By 1924 the book was in its 16th edition, having sold almost half a million copies in the U.S. and abroad.

The decade witnessed the birth of a pro-sex crusade. Magazines published the essays of Havelock Ellis, who introduced most of Freud's sexual theory to America. (One observer called Freud's work "foreign propaganda" as though linking sex with Marxism and communism.) A few American physicians took over the task of spreading the word, writing "doctor's books," sex manuals that were supposedly restricted to members of the medical profession.

Young swells took to reading the works of one Dr. Robie to impressionable young women. This pioneer guidebook, wrote Edmund Wilson, "aimed to remove inhibitions by giving you permission to do anything you liked."

W.F. Robie, a doctor in Baldwinville, Massachusetts and a "sometime fellow" at Clark University (where Freud delivered his only American lectures), argued for Rational. Sex Ethics and celebrated The Art of Love. Sex might be perfectly natural, but it was almost never naturally perfect. Robie not only gave permission but also brought a can-do attitude to the nuts and bolts of lovemaking.

Dr. Robie told the man to stimulate the clitoris, the woman to "follow her inclinations as to the force, distance or rapidity of the in-and-out motion." He recommended positions other than the customary "husband above and astride." He counseled both partners to pause before orgasm to allow the other partner to catch up. He claimed that sex was "invigorating, stimulating and tending to a concentration of the best energy before an intellectual or physical effort."

If reading Robie aloud would not do the job, there was always the work of Samuel Schmalhausen.

Schmalhausen, another popularizer of Freud, wrote an enthusiastic treatise in 1928 called Why We Misbehave. (Reviewers thought the title should be Why We Should Misbehave.) In this work, he notes the transformation in American mores: "Static morality has been repudiated in favor of dynamic experience. Fear yields its sovereignty reluctantly to fun. Passion's coming of age heralds the dawn of a new orientation in the (continued on page 144)The Jazz Age(continued from page 114) life of the sexes. We may sum up the quintessence of the sexual revolution by saying that the center of gravity has shifted from procreation to recreation." Schmalhausen extolled the virtue of playful sex: "Sexual love as happy recreation is the clean new ideal of a younger generation sick of duplicity and moral sham and marital insincerity and general erotic emptiness. Sex as recreation is the most exquisite conception of lovers who have learned to look with frank delighted eyes upon the wonder in their own stirred bodies."

Down boy.

In 1929 James Thurber and E.B. White would look at the literature and ask, rhetorically, Is Sex Necessary?:

During the past year, two factors in our civilization have been greatly overemphasized. One is aviation, the other is sex. Looked at calmly, neither diversion is entitled to the space it has been accorded. Each has been deliberately promoted. In the case of aviation, persons interested in the sport saw that the problem was to simplify it and make it seem safer. With sex, the opposite was true. Everybody was fitted for it, but there was a lack of general interest. The problem in this case was to make sex seem more complex and dangerous. This task was taken up by sociologists, analysts, gynecologists, psychologists and authors; they approached it with a good deal of scientific knowledge and an immense zeal. They joined forces and made the whole matter of sex complicated beyond the wildest dreams of our fathers. The country became flooded with books. Sex, which had hitherto been a physical expression, became largely mental. The whole order of things changed. To prepare for marriage, young girls no longer assembled a hope chest--they read books on abnormal psychology. If they finally did marry they found themselves with a large number of sex books on hand, but almost no pretty underwear.

The lost Generation

The generation that came of age in the decade after World War One was the first of the moderns. Born and raised in the era of mass culture, with movies, magazines and advertising--new ideas could reach millions overnight--they had little or no sense of the values that had shaped America. Theirs was the first generation, the first peer group since the founding fathers, that had to come up with its own rules.

Writing in 1931, Frederick Lewis Allen explained the transformation:

An upheaval in values was taking place. Modesty, reticence and chivalry were going out of style; women no longer wanted to be ladylike or could appeal to their daughters to be wholesome; it was not too widely suspected that the old-fashioned lady had been a sham and that the wholesome girl was merely inhibiting a nasty mind and would come to no good end. Victorian and puritan were becoming terms of opprobrium: Up-to-date people thought of Victorians as old ladies with bustles and inhibitions and of puritans as bluenosed, ranting spoilsports. It was better to be modern. Everybody wanted to be modern--and sophisticated, and smart, to smash the conventions and to be devastatingly frank. And with a cocktail glass in one's hand it was easy at least to be frank.

Writers in Greenwich Village supplied the credo for the new generation. According to the critic Malcolm Cowley, self-expression was all. In Exile's Return he spelled out the new values. Each man should "realize his full individuality through creative work and beautiful living in beautiful surroundings." The Greenwich Village man and woman were pagans who believed that "the bods is a temple in which there is nothing unclean, a shrine to be adorned for the ritual of love." Above all else was the idea of living for the moment. "Better to seize the moment as it comes, to dwell in it intensely, even at the cost of future suffering."

Villagers and their kindred spirits across America believed in "the idea of liberty--every law, convention or rule of art that prevents self-expression or the full enjoyment of the moment should be shattered and abolished."

Edmund Wilson would describe meeting and falling in love with poet Edna St. Vincent Millay--she would go to his apartment to take hot baths (perfectly understandable in an era of cold-water flats). Millay was a disciple of sex. One of her poems describes her years in the Village simply: "Lust was there/and nights not spent alone." She became the apex of a ménage à trois--Wilson writes obliquely of an evening spent on the daybed. Millay told John Peale Bishop to attend to her upper half, Wilson to the lower half, then wondered aloud who had the better share.

Millay was a modern Sappho, famous for having had 18 affairs within years of moving to the Village. Her friends read a great deal into another Millay poem:

My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--,

It gives a lovely light!

Allen saw the limits of the revolutionary zeal. The youth of the Jazz Age "believed in a greater degree of sex freedom than had been permitted by the strict American code; and as for discussion of sex, not only did they believe it should be free but some of them appeared to believe it should be continuous. They read about sex, talked about sex, thought about sex and defied anybody to say no."

To a large part, the values of the Lost Generation were shaped by the great American fiasco, Prohibition.

Prohibition

On January 16, 1920 the country went dry. John F. Kramer, the first Prohibition Commissioner, described the Volstead Act: "This law will be obeyed in cities, large and small; and where it is not obeyed, it will be enforced. The law says that liquor to be used as a beverage must not be manufactured. We shall see that it is not manufactured. Nor sold, nor given away, nor hauled in anything on the surface of the earth or under the earth or in the air."

Prohibition was the noble experiment. Since its origins following the Civil War, the dry crusade had sought to mandate "clear thinking and clean living" by legislation. The movement subsequently exploited the war effort in World War One. The military had embraced prohibition. (The country's survival depended on straight-thinking soldiers and sober workers back home.) Now the whole country would. The Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union waltzed the 18th Amendment through the Senate and House and through the necessary state legislatures with surprising ease. (A few observers noted that the Amendment passed while some 3 million men were out of the country, having fought a war to make the world safe for democracy.) President Woodrow Wilson vetoed the insanity, but Congress overrode the veto with more than enough votes.

Prohibition was unenforceable. A handful of agents set about policing the drinking habits of millions. The great experiment created almost immediately a generation of lawlessness. The Jazz Age, with its speakeasies and hip flasks, bathtub gin and home stills, was nothing short of a counterculture.

Gangsters were local heroes. Smalltime hoodlums who had previously trafficked in prostitution, extortion and gambling became big-time mobsters. Prohibition marked the ascension of organized crime in America. Where the original robber barons made their fortunes by controlling a single resource such as coal or steel, the new elite controlled alcohol. Lucrative? A Chicago gangster went into business with a formerly legit brewer and raked in more than $50 million in the first four years of Prohibition. Just like the robber barons, gangsters built mansions and bought governments. At the height of his power Al Capone made $105 million a year. His lifestyle was somewhat more ostentatious than that of a Boston blue-blood. Greed begat gun battles. Newspapers covered gangland politics in more detail than Washington politics. Every week there were stories of frame-ups and fall guys, gun molls and torpedoes, diamond stickpins and stickup artists.

The crime lords created a new and exciting underworld. Limousines and taxis lined up outside nightclubs and speakeasies. Elegantly dressed men and women whispered passwords through peepholes. Men and women drank side by side at the bar, or in candlelit booths or alcoves. Privacy plus intimacy, the thrill of rebellion, the sauce of secrecy--a heady recipe.

Prohibition was the creation of well-intentioned women whose lips had never touched lips that touched liquor. But now the flappers' lips were touching alcohol. On a regular basis, American women were getting "spifflicated." Collegians crashed parties and automobiles, in roughly that order. The culture broke through other barriers as well: White customers drove to the Cotton Club in Harlem to see Duke Ellington and drink the night away. Drinking was sophisticated and sexy.

People began to drink at home as well, with not-unexpected results. It seemed that everybody had a favorite bootlegger. Malcolm Cowley wrote: "The party conceived as a gathering together of men and women to drink gin cocktails, flirt, dance to the phonograph or radio and gossip about their absent friends had in fact become one of the most popular American institutions; nobody stopped to think how short its history had been in this country."

Fitzgerald described the role of alcohol this way: "It became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders. By 1923 their elders, tired of watching the carnival with ill-concealed envy, had discovered that young liquor will take the place of young blood, and with a whoop the orgy began. A whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure, the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls."

Frederick Lewis Allen also notes the spread of petting parties from youngsters in their teens and 20s to older men and women: "When the gin flask was passed about the hotel bedroom during a dance, or the musicians stilled their saxophones during the Saturday night party at the country club, men of affairs and women with half-grown children had their little taste of raw sex. One began to hear of young girls, intelligent and wellborn, who had spent weekends with men before marriage and had told their prospective husbands everything and had been not merely forgiven, but told that there was nothing to forgive; a little experience, these men felt, was all to the good for any girl. Millions of people were moving toward acceptance of what a bon vivant of earlier days had said was his idea of the proper state of morality--'A single standard, and that a low one."'

In combination with the automobile, the hip flask made seduction a certainty. Judge Ben Lindsey, a liberal from Denver, would say of the delinquents brought before him: "No petting party, no roadhouse toot, no joyride far from the prying eye of Main Street is complete unless the boys carry flasks. There are no actual statistics to be had on these matters, but it is very clear in my mind that practically all of the cases where these girls and boys lose their judgment in Folly Lane involve the use of drink."

Literature and Lust

Into this world came authors who believed that Victorian repression had crippled mankind. Writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Eugene O'Neill and Ernest Hemingway refused to accept or spread what one literary historian called "the lying gospel that sexuality is somehow degrading."

Sherwood Anderson said simply: "We wanted the flesh back in our literature, wanted directly in our literature the fact of men and women in bed together, babies being born. We wanted the terrible importance of the flesh in human relations also revealed again."

The call to lust would not go unnoticed. Leaders of the dry crusade turned their energies to sex and literature. Robert Woods, a Boston social worker with his own grasp of Freud, believed that Prohibition would "profoundly stimulate a vast process of national purification" by hastening "the sublimation of the sex instinct upon which the next stage of progress for the human race so largely depends."

The Christian Century asserted: "Prohibition is the censorship of beverages, and censorship is the prohibition of harmful literature and spectacles. In general principle, the two problems are one. Both undertake to protect individuals against their own unwise or vicious choices." Harlan Fiske Stone, dean of the Columbia University School of Law, saw the impending clash. "The whole country is in danger of being ruined by a smug puritanism," he wrote a young lawyer, "and intelligent people with liberal ideas, especially lawyers, ought to fight this tendency."

And fight they did. Freedom and the future of America went on the block in numerous courtrooms.

The censors targeted Broadway plays, closing Mae West's Sex after 375 performances. They seized the printing plates for The President's Daughter--a memoir written by Warren Harding's mistress (she alleged that the president had had sex with her in a closet at the White House). They ignored steamy best-sellers such as Warner Fabian's Flaming Youth and Unforbidden Fruit and instead went after the best and the brightest.

In New York John Sumner--Anthony Comstock's successor at the Society for the Suppression of Vice--swore out a complaint against Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, editors of The Little Review. The magazine had published excerpts of James Joyce's Ulysses.

Lawyers for the defendants tried to have the offending passages read into the record. The three-judge panel refused "out of consideration for the ladies present"--the same ladies who had published the erotic musings. The work was judged obscene.

In 1928 D.H. Lawrence had 1000 copies of Lady Chatterley's Lover, his final novel, privately printed in Italy. He sold the unexpurgated text by subscription to readers in England and America. Almost immediately, pirated editions began to circulate, making the story of an English aristocrat and her gamekeeper the world's most famous dirty book.

In Boston an agent of the Watch and Ward Society had James DeLacey, proprietor of the Dunster House Bookshop, arrested for selling one of the unexpurgated first-edition copies. He was sentenced to four months in jail and fined $800. The society also targeted Donald Friede, publisher of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. Dreiser himself was no stranger to controversy. His first novel, Sister Carrie, had been suppressed and bowdlerized by Doubleday, its publisher; another novel, The Genius, outraged moralists with its suggestion that a man could not be tied to a single woman.

At Friede's obscenity trial, the district attorney read offending passages of An American Tragedy to the jury. One concerned the visit of the book's protagonist to a brothel:

And now, seated here, she had drawn very close to him and touched his hands and finally linking an arm in his and pressing close to him, inquired if he didn't want to see how pretty some of the rooms on the second floor were furnished. And he allowed himself to be led up that curtained back stair and into a small pink and blue furnished room. This interestingly well-rounded and graceful Venus turned the moment they were within and held him to her, then calmly and before a tall mirror which revealed her fully to herself and him, began to disrobe.

In his closing arguments, the district attorney defended community standards, and then tried to impose them on the entire nation: "Perhaps where the gentleman who published this book comes from it is not considered obscene, indecent and impure for a woman to start disrobing before a man, but it happens to be out in Roxbury, where I come from."

The jury found the publisher guilty.

The phrase banned in Boston thus entered the American language.

H.L. Mencken, a columnist for The Baltimore Sun and editor of Smart Set and the American Mercury, was the most vocal opponent of the old order. Vowing to "combat, chiefly by ridicule, American piety, stupidity, tin-pot morality and cheap chauvinism in all their forms," he attacked reformers, moralists, the KKK, preachers, fundamentalists, patriots, politicians, poltroons and censors.

In a brilliant essay published just after World War One, Mencken tracked the impact of puritanism as a literary force. What began on the mourner's bench in New England churches--the spectacle of an individual solemnly confronting his own sinfulness--had become a sport of tormenting "the happy rascal across the street." Mencken noted that prosperity created the purge; that following the Civil War, newly minted "Christian millionaires" bankrolled everything from vice crusades to Prohibition: "Wealth, discovering its power, has reached out its long arms to grab the distant and innumerable sinner; it has gone down into its deep pockets to pay for his costly pursuit and flaying; it has created the puritan entrepreneur, the daring and imaginative organizer of puritanism, the baron of moral endeavor."

The American puritan, noted the sage of Baltimore, "was not content with the rescue of his own soul. He felt an irresistible impulse to hand salvation on, to disperse and multiply it, to ram it down reluctant throats, to make it free, universal and compulsory." Puritans had instituted "a campaign of repression and punishment perhaps unequaled in the history of the world."

Elsewhere, he ridiculed the "intolerable prudishness and dirty-mindedness of puritanism" and its "theory that the enforcement of chastity by a huge force of spies, stool pigeons and police would convert the republic into a nation of moral esthetes. All this, of course, is simply pious fudge. If the notion were actually sound, then all the great artists of the world would come from the ranks of the hermetically repressed, i.e., from the ranks of old maids, male and female. But the truth is, as everyone knows, that the great artists of the world are never puritans and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No moral man--that is moral in the YMCA sense--has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading, and it is highly improbable that the thing has ever been done by a virtuous woman."

Mencken directly challenged the Boston branch of the bluenoses: He sold a copy of the American Mercury to the spokesman of the Watch and Ward Society, knowing that it would lead to his arrest.

When the man paid 50 cents, Mencken--deliberately and in full view of the gathered crowd--bit the coin to see if it was genuine.

The Facts of Life

The times had changed since Margaret Sanger opened the first U.S. birth control clinic in 1916--an act for which she had gone to jail. Her lawyer had challenged the law and won. A New York court declared it legal to dispense birth control information to women whose health demanded it. But obtaining the devices was a problem.

Sanger opened a two-room office on Fifth Avenue. In the first two months of operation, 2700 women came to the office for advice. The clinic dispensed at least 900 diaphragms.

The diaphragms came from Holland. An Italian neighbor smuggled in the birth control devices in liquor bottles--along with Dutch gin--from ships anchored beyond the 12-mile limit. Sanger's second husband, J. Noah Slee, later brought in contraband items on trainloads of 3-in-1 Oil from Canada. Late in the decade an American company, Holland Rantos, would begin to produce rubber diaphragms, but one doubts the American product had the novelty of those brought in by smugglers.

Condoms were more available. The health lectures from World War One had introduced an entire generation to their usefulness. Trojan, the first brand of latex condoms, debuted in 1920. The condoms were sold in gas stations, tobacco shops, barbershops and drugstores--for the prevention of disease only. Proponents of birth control still faced legal obstacles. In 1918, 18 states had laws that prohibited the dissemination of contraceptive information. Another 23 had laws stating that "contraceptive information is immoral or obscene and therefore criminal." Only five states--Georgia, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina and Washington--did not restrict birth control information.

The church still controlled the debate: At the beginning of the decade the archbishop of New York personally dispatched city police to prevent Sanger from delivering a lecture on birth control at Town Hall.

Two separate organizations--Sanger's American Birth Control League and Mary Ware Dennett's Voluntary Parenthood League--turned their attentions to Washington. If family limitation was to be a reality, the law drafted by Anthony Comstock in 1873 that forbade "mailing obscene or crime-inciting matter" would have to be changed. The two groups began to work their way through the Congressional Directory, trying to find sponsors for a law that would remove the words equating "prevention of conception" with "obscenity." Then, the individual states would fall in line. Doctors would have no fear of meddlesome vice agents; women returning from Europe with the latest contraceptive technology would not fall prey to Customs agents.

The two groups differed on one vital point: Sanger wanted doctors to dispense birth control information to female patients (viewing it as a woman's issue), while Dennett wanted the information available to all (viewing birth control as a concern for both sexes--and none of the doctor's business).

Doctors were not comfortable with family limitation or birth control: For years, the profession had battled to distinguish itself from the quacks, dispensers of patent medicine and herbalists who dealt with "women's problems." Birth control supposedly threatened their respectability. Robert Latou Dickinson, a New York obstetrician, headed a committee to look into the matter. The group tried to work with Sanger and Dennett, but the alliance failed.

The birth control crusade was met with ambivalence among politicians as well. Few congressmen committed to a revision of the Comstock Act. Dr. Hubert Work, assistant postmaster general and former president of the AMA, told Dennett that the purpose of the Voluntary-Parenthood League was to "instruct everybody how to have illicit intercourse without the danger of pregnancy."

Dr. Work was promoted to postmaster general in 1922 when his predecessor, Will Hays, left to monitor the morals of Hollywood. Work posted a bulletin in all post offices stating that it was a criminal offense to send or receive matter relating to the prevention of conception.

When Dennett ridiculed the decision in an editorial, she received notice: "My Dear Madam: According to advice from the solicitor for the Post Office, the pamphlet entitled The Sex Side of Life: An Explanation for Young People, by Mary Ware Dennett, is unmailable under Section 211 of the Penal Code. As copies of this pamphlet bearing your name as the sender have been found in the mails, the decision is communicated for your information and guidance."

It was intimidation, pure and simple. In 1915 Dennett had written a pamphlet on the facts of life for her two sons. Far from being obscene, it had been endorsed by the YMCA (the same organization that had funded Comstock).

Dennett continued to lobby Congress to change the law, and she distributed more than 30,000 copies of The Sex Side of Life. In 1929 Mrs. Carl A. Miles--supposedly a member in good standing of the Daughters of the American Revolution--filed a formal complaint. (Mrs. Miles, it turned out, was the creation of the Post Office.) Dennett was charged with mailing a "pamphlet, booklet and certain printed matter, which were obscene, lewd, lascivious and filthy, vile and indecent, against the peace and dignity of the U.S."

Dennett chose to fight. She hired Morris Ernst, a young lawyer with the recently formed American Civil Liberties Union, to defend her.

It became clear immediately that the law was being used to force a particular moral view on the women of America. On the day of the open hearing, Dennett discovered that Judge Grover Moscowitz had invited three Brooklyn clergymen to share the bench with him "to aid the conscience of the court."

Warren Booth Burrows, the eventual trial judge, was no improvement. The judge refused to hear any of the witnesses--including YMCA representatives and Dr. Dickinson--who found value in the pamphlet. The judge also refused to allow letters from supporters to be read into the record.

The prosecutor selected the members of the jury with great care. "Have any of you ever read anything by Havelock Ellis or H.L. Mencken?" he asked. Those who admitted they had were dismissed. The prosecutor then went on the attack, claiming Dennett was a defiler of youth: "Not one word in this about chastity! Not one word about self-control! Not one word to distinguish simple lust from lawful passion! It describes the act as being accompanied by the greatest pleasure and enjoyment. Why, there's nothing a boy could see, on reading this book, except a darkened room and a woman! Where does the institution of honor and family come off if we let a gospel like that go out to the world?"

Dennett was found guilty and, like Sanger more than a decade earlier, became a heroine overnight. Senators promised to pass the bill to amend the Comstock Act (but once again found inactivity to be the best political course). On March 3, 1930 Justice Augustus Hand delivered a reversal: "The defendant's discussion of the phenomenon of sex is written with sincerity of feeling and with an idealization of the marriage relation and sex emotion. We think it tends to rationalize and dignify such emotions rather than to arouse lust. We hold that an accurate exposition of the relevant facts of the sex side of life in decent language and in manifesting serious and disinterested spirit cannot ordinarily be regarded as obscene."

Hollywood Babylon

The Twenties revolved around three almost mythic centers: Greenwich Village, Paris and Hollywood. Greenwich Village supplied the ideas (of underpaid writers and struggling artists whose free love and experimental styles provided the inspiration for the Jazz Age), Paris was the playground (where expatriates got to experience a Continental lifestyle away from Mrs. Grundy and enjoy a good drink in the cafés of Montparnasse) and Hollywood provided the fantasies (the imagination made visible).

Hollywood was as free and unfettered as Greenwich Village or Paris, only everyone was rich and beautiful. The film colony vied with the original colonies for control of the American dream. In 1920, 35 million people attended the movies each week. In 1920 Mary Pickford earned $1 million a year, more than ten times the salary of the president. Hollywood stars were the most famous people on the planet.

Douglas Fairbanks played characters who tumbled, boxed, fenced and played golf and tennis. He was a bare-chested swashbuckler, the thief of Baghdad, Zorro. He fairly leaped from the screen. When he opened a string of gyms, he taught men to perfect and enjoy their bodies, insisting that athleticism was an "antidote to too much civilization" and an alternative to the "sea of sensuousness." The proper response to temptation, it seemed, was a quick jog around the park or a few rounds in the gym.

Pickford was America's sweetheart, a resourceful, independent woman who in film after film tackled problems with her sleeves rolled to the elbows, who danced with Gypsies and workers, who gave advice to the young women of the day.

In 1920 these two perfect symbols of American manhood and womanhood divorced their respective spouses and married. Their home--Pickfair--became a gathering place for royalty, both real and of the sort created in Hollywood.

If Doug and Mary represented an all-American kind of sex appeal, an exotic new matinee idol who represented a different sort of sex appeal, more controversial and forbidden, soon took center stage.

Rodolpho Alfonzo Raffaele Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d'Anlonguolla, an Italian gardener and dancer by way of Long Island, a.k.a. Rudolph Valentino, did more to raise the sexual temperature of the nation than any other single individual. In The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, he appeared painting three nudes in a studio, then went on to dance a smoldering tango. The Horsemen grossed $4.5 million. The Sheik established him as the sex symbol of the decade.

The movie poster for The Sheik proclaimed: "See: The auction of beautiful girls to the lords of Algerian harems. The barbaric gambling fete in the glittering casino of Biskra. The heroine, disguised, invade the bedouin's secret slave rites. Sheik Ahmed raid her caravan and carry her off to his tent. Her stampede his Arabian horses and dash away to freedom. The sheik's vengeance. The storm in the desert. A proud girl's heart surrendered."

At first American men were put off by this pomaded, smoldering Latin lover. But they noticed the effect he had on their wives and girlfriends. Valentino was a he-vamp.

American men began to call themselves sheiks, their girlfriends shebas. When Valentino kissed the palm of a lover, men copied the move and hoped for the same result. Those who couldn't flare their nostrils or make their eyes flash with sparks were doomed to failure. When a reporter for the Chicago Tribune blamed Valentino for the effeminization of American men, he challenged the writer to a duel.

When Valentino died unexpectedly of a perforated ulcer in 1926, more than 30,000 mourners visited the funeral home where he lay in state. For decades, an unidentified fan, the Lady in Black, visited his tomb on the anniversary of his death.

Clara Bow became a sex star when she starred in a spunky 1927 comedy called It. Novelist Elinor Glyn had converted her novel into the definitive flapper film. The movie begins with a man reading a story in Cosmopolitan (authored by Glyn) that describes whether or not a given person has sex appeal, that magical quality called "It." Bow portrayed a shopgirl who sets her sights on the owner of the department store in which she works. Finding herself with nothing to wear on the big date, she takes a pair of scissors to her work dress, cuts a neckline almost to her navel and whips up a perfect evening dress. She gets the guy.

Offscreen she got the guy as well, being linked with everyone from Gary Cooper to the USC football team. She had "It," and knew how to use "It"--until the advent of talkies at the end of the decade revealed she also had a strong Brooklyn accent. Her career as a sex symbol ended soon after.

The culture depicted in films was singularly sexy. America watched a young Joan Crawford cut loose on a tabletop in Our Dancing Daughters, a heart-stopping Gloria Swanson emerge from a luxurious bath in a Cecil B. De Mille epic, a smoldering Greta Garbo seduce and abandon John Gilbert.

E.S. Turner claims in A History of Courting that movies changed the mating dance forever: "The cinema taught girls the peculiar potency of the female eye, how to halt or dismiss a man with a look; how to search his eyes at close quarters. It taught girls to recognize the symptoms of a kiss coming on, how to parry it, how to encourage it while apparently avoiding it, or how to return it with interest. There is evidence in more than one quarter that the cinema taught girls the trick of closing their eyes when kissed, which one had always supposed to be a natural instinct of women. It encouraged them to kick up one heel (or even two heels) when embraced. It also taught them how and when to slap."

On-screen, anything was possible. It was what happened offscreen that changed Hollywood.

Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle

In 1913 a self-described "funny man and acrobat" walked onto a movie lot in Los Angeles. Something about the fat man caught Mack Sennett's eye: Within a year Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle was writing, directing and acting in short comedies. Teamed with Mabel Normand (Sennett's girlfriend), Fatty was the victim of filmdom's first custard pie. He elevated the pratfall to a multistory art. His output was extraordinary: at least 50 titles the first year alone. Over the next three years his salary rose from $25 a week to more than $1 million a year. In 1920 Arbuckle starred in a feature called The Life of the Party. In 1921 he made Brewster's Millions, the first of six features he would film in seven months. He had recently signed a three-year contract worth $3 million and decided it was time to take a break. "I'm taking a little trip to the city," he said.

In those days, the city was San Francisco. Los Angeles was a studio town, with a lot of open spaces, orange groves, sagebrush-filled back lots and a few expensive mansions.

Arbuckle and friends drove a custom $25,000 Pierce Arrow up the coast to San Francisco and checked into three rooms in the St. Francis Hotel. A local bootlegger provided gin and whiskey. The front desk supplied setups. Another call produced a Victrola. The party was under way.

Shortly after noon on Labor Day, two guests arrived: Virginia Rappe, a sometime actress and party girl, and Bambina Maude Delmont, an occasional "dress model" and a provider of party girls. (She ran a badger game, putting rich victims in compromising positions.)

After some drinking, Rappe apparently wandered into one of the bedrooms. Arbuckle followed.

Arbuckle said he found Rappe on the floor of the bathroom; he gave her a glass of water and placed her on a bed, then returned to the bathroom. When he emerged Rappe was tearing at her clothes and screaming, "I'm dying, I'm dying." Other partygoers flocked into the room and tried to calm Rappe, putting her in a cold bath, applying ice packs, finally calling the hotel manager to get the distraught woman her own room. A house doctor treated her for excessive drinking.

The party wound down. Arbuckle and friends checked out of the hotel and returned to Los Angeles. Four days after the party Rappe died in a hospital of peritonitis, the result of a burst bladder.

Delmont surfaced with a wild story. Arbuckle, she said, had dragged Rappe to the bedroom and ravaged her. Delmont claimed she had pounded on the door, trying to rescue her friend, and had found Rappe with her clothing torn to shreds, moaning on the bed: "I'm dying, I'm dying. He killed me."

Delmont told this story to the police, the press and a grand jury and Arbuckle was arrested for murder. William Randolph Hearst and the tabloids exploited the tragedy. America's funniest fat man became a monster. Arbuckle, it was said, raped the actress with a Coke bottle, a champagne bottle, a jagged piece of ice.

Rappe, whose portrait had graced the sheet music to Let Me Call You Sweetheart (earning her the title Sunbonnet Girl), was portrayed as purity incarnate, Arbuckle as everything corrupt about Hollywood.

The city of San Francisco rose to defend the honor of American womanhood. The Women's Vigilant Committee took over the courtroom: When Arbuckle arrived they stood and spat at him. An ambitious prosecutor played to the crowd, bullying or hiding witnesses and ignoring evidence, turning the judicial process into a show trial.

The facts? An autopsy showed that there had been no rape. A nurse said Rappe had confided in her that she suffered from syphilis. A doctor testified that syphilis can cause a bladder to burst. It appeared that Rappe had had a number of abortions; some argued that the peritonitis resulted from a botched one.

Delmont, the only person who claimed that Rappe had been abused by Arbuckle, never took the stand. It seems the prosecution realized that its star witness was a blackmailer, a bigamist and, in all probability, a panderer.

After two inconclusive trials, a third jury acquitted Arbuckle, asking that the following be entered into the record: "Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle. We feel that a great injustice has been done him, for there was not the slightest proof adduced to connect him in any way with the commission of a crime."

The acquittal did not help. Arbuckle had already been convicted in the media and in the minds of the American public. The dream factory was caught in a nightmare.

On February 1, 1922, in the middle of Arbuckle's second trial, William Desmond Taylor, a director for Paramount, was found dead in his bungalow, two bullets through his heart. The surrounding scandal tainted the careers of some of Hollywood's most beloved actresses. Mabel Normand was the last to see Taylor alive (he'd given her a volume of Freud to read). Mary Pickford had to explain why her picture was hung prominently in the bachelor's apartment. Investigators found a scented love letter written by Mary Miles Minter in the director's bedroom. The murder was never solved, but, as in the Arbuckle case, the flurry of rumors showed that demons loomed large in America's sexual imagination. Taylor, it was said, dabbled in witchcraft, adultery and sexual perversion. Former friends claimed that in the months before his death, Taylor had "visited the queer places in Los Angeles, where guests are served with marijuana and opium and morphine, where the drugs are wheeled in on tea carts and strange things happen."

The nation saw Hollywood as a modern Sodom, capable of seducing and destroying American daughters. One minister, inspired by the Arbuckle trial, proclaimed it time to cleanse the country of "movies, dancing, jazz, evolution, Jews and Catholics."

In 1921, 37 state legislatures had introduced 100 separate censorship bills. The General Federation of Women's Clubs reviewed 1765 films and decreed that 59 percent were "not morally worthwhile" and another 21 percent were simply "bad."

The Arrival of Will Hays

To avoid congressional intervention, Hollywood studio heads hired Will Hays, postmaster general and former head of the Republican National Committee, to head the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. A darling of the purity movements, Hays knew which buttons to push. "Above all is our duty to youth," he announced within months of taking office. "We must have toward that sacred thing, the mind of a child, toward that clean and virgin thing, that unmarked slate--we must have toward that the same responsibility, the same care about the impression made upon it, that the best teacher or the best clergyman, the most inspired teacher of youth, would have."

Within days of Arbuckle's acquittal, Hays announced that the actor would not work in Hollywood again.

Hays demanded that morals clauses be put into every contract; henceforth, actors "would conduct themselves with due regard to public conventions and morals and will not do anything tending to degrade him or her in society, or bring him or her into public hatred, contempt, scorn or ridicule, or tending to shock, insult or offend the community or outrage public morals or decency, or tending to prejudice the company or the motion picture industry." Private detectives ferreted out 117 Hollywood names considered unsafe--be it because of drug use, roadhouse orgies, a taste for members of the same sex or too-flagrant affairs. The list was called "the doom book."

One of the first victims was Wallace Reid, a dashing action hero with a drug habit. He was spirited away to a sanitarium, where he eventually died.

Hays also created a list of dos and don'ts for film. The members of the MPPDA struck a gentlemen's agreement to eliminate movies that dealt with sex in an "improper" manner, were based on white slavery, made vice attractive, exhibited nakedness, had prolonged passionate love scenes, were predominantly concerned with the underworld, made gambling and drunkenness attractive, might instruct the weak in methods of committing crime, ridiculed public officials, offended religious beliefs, emphasized violence, portrayed vulgar postures and gestures or used salacious subtitles or advertising.

The list of forbidden topics was to be further refined by Hays. There would be--among two dozen or so potentially morally offensive topics--no profanity, no licentious or suggestive nudity (in fact or in silhouette), no inference of sexual perversion or white slavery, no scenes of actual childbirth, no mention of sex hygiene or venereal disease, no display of children's sex organs. Producers would be careful when dealing with the sale of women, rape or attempted rape, first-night scenes, men and women together in bed, deliberate seduction of girls and the use of drugs.

Hollywood adapted to the new code with a simple formula: six reels of sin, one of condemnation. Directors such as Cecil B. De Mille became famous for showing women in sumptuous bathrooms, disrobing, sinking into oiled baths. He joked that cleanliness was next to godliness, and he created a sensuality that did not exist outside of Hollywood. De Mille's lurid epics could show all of the sins of the Old Testament by cloaking them in the plain blue wrapper of religion.

The Hays code held out a promise to America--if we can control the make-believe, we can ignore the reality. It was, at first, pure posturing. Studio heads hung signs welcoming Hays to Hollywood. Charlie Chaplin, it is said, placed his over the bathroom door.

The Little Tramp

By the Twenties, Charlie Chaplin was the most recognized actor in the world. There were songs about the Little Tramp, Chaplin dolls--and a partnership in United Artists (a film company founded in 1919 by Chaplin, director D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford).

When it came to his personal life, Chaplin was the most silent of the silent-film stars.

Chaplin's autobiography deals with one of his marriages with a single paragraph: "During the filming of The Gold Rush in 1925 I married for the second time. Because we have two grown sons of whom I am very fond, I will not go into any details. For two years we were married and tried to make a go of it, but it was hopeless and ended in a great deal of bitterness."

The woman, Lita Grey, was the original Lolita. She first met Chaplin when she was seven. By the age of 15 she was working as an extra. When she discovered she was pregnant, Chaplin and Grey were married. Her mother came along to run the house.

The divorce papers, widely circulated at the time, still make great reading.

Lawyers alleged:

• That Chaplin had "solicited, urged and demanded that plaintiff submit to, perform and commit such acts and things for the gratification of defendant's said abnormal, unnatural, perverted and degenerate sexual desires, as to be too revolting, indecent and immoral to set forth in detail in this complaint."

• That Chaplin's demands of sex acts were a "shock to her refined sensibilities, repulsive to her moral instincts and abhorrent to her conception of moral and personal decency."

• That Chaplin recounted "to her in detail his personal experience with five prominent moving-picture women involving such practices."

• That Chaplin attempted to "undermine and distort plaintiff's normal sexual impulses and desires, demoralize her standards of decency and degrade her conception of morals for the gratification of the defendant's aforesaid unnatural desires."

The unnatural desire was for oral sex.

The divorce papers claimed that Chaplin demanded his wife "commit the act of sex perversion defined by Section 288a of the Penal Code of California. That defendant became enraged at plaintiff's refusal and said to her: 'All married people do those kinds of things. You are my wife and you have to do what I want you to do. I can get a divorce from you for refusing to do this."'

Rather than face the kind of public wrath that had ended Arbuckle's career, Chaplin settled the divorce for $625,000. His little Lolita split the money with her mother.

Years later, Grey would write her own account of life with Chaplin, one far more earthy than the legalistic description of the divorce papers.

The loss of her virginity reads like a four-act play. The seduction took place in a hotel, at a beach, in the back of a limousine. Finally, in a steam room, she surrendered her maidenhood:

"The foglike mist billowed, grew thicker and thicker, finally filled every inch of the room. I couldn't see anything. The steam, gently caressing me, was making me drowsy, and I lay down on the marble slab and closed my eyes. Every picture and movie I'd ever seen of queens and princesses bathing in royal tubs, with slave girls drying them and anointing their bodies with perfumed oils, danced in front of me. I draped my arm over my forehead and crossed my ankles, wondering what was to happen next." What happened next was Charlie.

"Then there was a sharp piercing pain inside me and I cried out, but I did not release my grip. The pain blinded me far more than the encircling steam, but I writhed wildly, as though in ecstasy, to let him know I belonged to him--and then I received all of him. I was supposed to be a woman now. I was 15.

"I felt I had surpassed Pola Negri and the other human sex symbols Charlie had known. And winning the contest exhilarated me."

The sad tale contains all of the elements of sex in the Twenties. The law was used to force marriage. (Lita's mom pointed out that sex with a minor was a jailable offense.) Law was used to leverage a divorce. (Oral sex was a punishable offense and sex appetite itself was grounds for a mental-cruelty charge.) Sex was considered to be a competition against other women. And even in Hollywood, women came to sex with images from the silver screen swirling through their heads.

Prosperity and Passion

Thomas Edison may have been optimistic about America's love affair with speed, the quickness of action and its control. Control was definitely hard to find in the Jazz Age. Prosperity--the roar of the Twenties--offered the fantasy that anything was possible.

Dan Caswell, scion of a wealthy Cleveland family, boarded a train one day and saw Jessica Reed, a Titian-haired star of the Ziegfeld Follies. He followed her to the hotel where Ziegfeld's chorus was staying. Marjorie Farnsworth, in her chronicle of the Follies, writes: "That night Caswell called all the Follies beauties down to the lobby and with a gesture that he hoped reeked of sophistication, opened a chamois bag of diamonds that belonged to his mother--diamonds worth $30,000--and sprinkled them over the marble floor. An instant later the floor was covered with scrambling girls, pulling, pushing and grabbing. It was at that moment that he asked the Titian-haired beauty to marry him, and, pausing only to remove a diamond from her mouth where she'd put it for safekeeping, she softly murmured 'Yes."'

The diamonds--the family jewels--were to have been made into a necklace for his blue-blooded Boston fiancée.

As for the Fitzgeralds, the couple used heaps of cash to "add polish to their life." As Zelda would later explain, in a novel written within the walls of an asylum, "It costs more to ride on the tops of taxis than on the inside."

Once, when Scott told her they were broke, she answered, "Well, let's go to the movies."

The Crash

With the same speed that characterized every other aspect of the decade, the prosperity came to an abrupt end. On October 24, 1929 the stock market crashed. Polly Adler, madam of an exclusive brothel in New York, told the effect of the crash on her customers:

I had thought my business would fall off, but it was just the opposite--I had almost more customers than I could take care of. Men wanted to go out and forget their troubles, blot out, at least temporarily, those headlines which each day told of more bankruptcies and suicides. The easiest escape, of course, was alcohol, and in the months immediately after the crash I had my biggest profits at the bar. Some men who had been terrific womanizers now came to the house solely to drink, and no longer showed the slightest interest in my girls. Others who had been separated from their wives for years, or steadily unfaithful to them, stayed home and turned into model husbands. And still others, who had been casual customers, now came in nightly and behaved like satyrs. The atmosphere, at times, was more that of an insane asylum than a bordello. One man told me he came there night after night because "a whorehouse is the only place I can cry without being ashamed."

A man whom I had always liked and considered a gentleman appeared one evening, requested the company of a certain girl and then proceeded to practice the most vile, cruel and inhuman acts until the girl was a physical wreck. The following morning the man went to his office and shot himself.

The party was over. What would follow would be the longest hangover in American history.

The telephone became love's ally. Advice columns replaced pulpits as the arbiters of courtship.

Jazz AgeGlossary

All Wet--Describes an erroneous idea or individual, as in, "He's all wet."

Applesauce--A term of derision for nonsense, lies; same as baloney, banana oil, bullshit, buncombe, bunk, hokum and horsefeathers.

Ball and Chain--One's wife, especially if she is domineering.

Bee's Knees--An extraordinary person, thing, idea; the ultimate.

Berries--That which is attractive or pleasing; similar to bee's knees. As in, "It's the berries."

Bible Belt--Area in the South and Midwest where Fundamentalism flourishes.

Big Cheese--The most important or influential person; boss. Same as big shot.

Bluenose--An excessively puritanical person, a prude. Creator of "the Blue Nozzle Curse."

Bronx Cheer--A loud spluttering noise, used to indicate disapproval. Same as raspberry.

Bull Session--Male talkfest, gossip, stories of sexual exploits.

Bump off--To murder.

Cake-Eater--An effete ladies' man, or someone who attends tea parties.

Carry a Torch--To suffer from unrequited love.

Cat's Meow--Something splendid or stylish; similar to bee's knees.

Cat's Pajamas--Same as cat's meow.

Cheaters--Eyeglasses.

Copacetic--Wonderful, fine, all right.

Crush--An infatuation.

Darb--An excellent person or thing (as in "the Darb"--a person with money who can be relied on to pay the check).

Drugstore Cowboy--A fashionable idler who hangs around public places trying to pick up women.

Fall Guy--Victim of a frame.

Flapper--A stylish, brash, hedonistic young woman with short skirts and shorter hair.

Flat Tire--A dull-witted, insipid, disappointing date. Same as pill, pickle, drag, rag, oilcan.

Frame--To give false evidence, to set up someone.

Gams--A woman's legs.

Giggle Water--An intoxicating beverage.

Gin Mill--An establishment where hard liquor is sold.

Gold Digger--A woman who associates with or marries a man for his wealth.

Heebie-Jeebies--The jitters.

High-Hat--To snub.

Hooch--Bootleg liquor.

Hoofer--Dancer.

Hotsy-Totsy--Pleasing.

It--Sex appeal.

Jake--OK, as in, "Everything is jake."

Jalopy--Old car.

Keen--Attractive or appealing.

Kisser--Mouth.

Line--Insincere flattery.

Lounge Lizard--A ladies' man; a social parasite; a ne'er-do-well.

Middle Aisle--To marry.

Moll--A gangster's girl.

Mrs. Grundy--A priggish or extremely tight-laced person.

Neck--Kissing with passion.

Nobody Home--Describes someone who is dumb.

Pet--Same as neck, but more so.

Pinch--To arrest.

Pushover--A person easily convinced or seduced.

Real Mccoy--The genuine article.

Ritzy--Elegant (from the hotel).

Sheba--A woman with sex appeal (from the movie Queen of Sheba).

Sheik--A man with sex appeal (from the Valentino movie).

Speakeasy--An illicit bar that sells bootleg liquor.

Spifflicated--Drunk. The same as canned, corked, tanked, primed, scrooched, jazzed, zozzled, plastered, owled, embalmed, lit, potted, ossified or fried to the hat.

Spiffy--An elegant appearance.

Struggle-Buggy--A car in which men try to seduce women.

Stuck On--Having a crush on.

Swanky--Ritzy.

Swell--Wonderful. Also: a rich man.

Torpedo--A hired gun.

Whoopee--To have a good time, especially with sex included (as in, "making whoopee").

Tunes of the Times

Optimism

Ain't We Got Fun? * I'm Sitting on Top of the World * I'm Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover * Look for the Silver Lining * Looking at the World Through Rose Colored Glasses * Good News * The Best Things in Life Are Free * When You're Smiling (the Whole World Smiles at You) * Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella * Singin' in the Rain

Nonsense

Yes! We Have No Bananas * Does the Spearmint Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight? * Barney Google * I Scream, You Scream (We All Scream for Ice Cream)

Guys

Lucky Lindy! * Clap Hands! Here Comes Charley! * I'm Just Wild About Harry * The Sheik of Araby * My Man * The Man I Love * I Must Have That Man * Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man * Those Wadding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine

Girls, Girls, Girls

Baby Face * Girl of My Dreams * Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue * Yes Sir! That's My Baby * Ain't She Sweet? * Sweet Georgia Brown * Sweet Sue--Just You * Sweet Lorraine * Sugar * Cherry * My Greenwich Village Sue * Rose of Washington Square * Secondhand Rose * My Little Bimbo Down on the Bamboo Isle * Sleepy Time Gal * Coquette * Mandy, Make Up Your Mind * Somebody Stole My Gal * She's Everybody's Sweetheart * Hard-Hearted Hannah

Alone and Lonely

All Alone * I'm Nobody's Baby * Somebody Loves Me * Are You Lonesome Tonight? * Red Lips, Kiss My Blues Away

Love, Love, Love

You're the Cream in My Coffee * You Do Something to Me * You Were Meant for Me * My Heart Stood Still * In a Mist * 'S Wonderful * Thou Swell * It Had to Be You * Always * My Kinda Love * I Can't Believe That You're in Love With Me * My Baby Just Cares for Me * Angry * Mean to Me * Baby, Won't You Please Come Home * You Took Advantage of Me * I Cried for You (Now It's Your Turn to Cry Over Me) * I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan * How Come You Do Me Like You Do? * You've Got to See Mama Ev'ry Night or You Can't See Mama at All * There'll Be Some Changes Made

Naughty but Nice

I'm a Vamp From East Broadway * Flamin' Mamie Roll 'Em Girls--(Roll 'Em Down and Show Your Pretty Knees) * Ma--He's Making Eyes at Me * (Your Lips Say No, No, But) There's Yes, Yes in Your Eyes * Gimme a Little Kiss, Will Ya, Huh? * Let's Misbehave * Let's Do It * Do It Again * How Long Has This Been Going On? * After You Get What You Want, You Don't Want It * Makin' Whoopee

Blues

Jazz Me Blues * Wang Wang Blues * Sugar Blues * Wabash Blues * Down Hearted Blues * Farewell Blues * Lonesome Mama Blues * Weary Blues * Limehouse Blues * Wolverine Blues * Davenport Blues * Basin Street Blues * Big City Blues

Dancing

Fidgety Feet * Fascinating Rhythm * I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate * Crazy Rhythm * Black Bottom * Muskrat Ramble * The Varsity Drag

Drinking

Prohibition Blues * Show Me the Way to Go Home

Movies

At the Moving Picture Ball * Oh Those Charley Chaplin Feet * Sweet Little Mary Pickford * If I Had a Talking Picture of You

Traveling

Toot, Toot, Tootsie! (Good Bye) * California, Here I Come * Chicago (That Toddling Town) * Manhattan * I'm Gonna Charleston Back to Charleston * I'm Coming, Virginia

The Crash

I Can't Give You Anything but Love * Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out